Quote:
Originally Posted by queasy27
I wasn't at the meeting with the hospital execs but didn't see in published reports that anybody asked not why the rating is so low, but why it went down from 3 to 2 to 1? What changed? The percentage of geriatrics and Medicare patients has remained thee same, as has the total bed count.
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Because people keep harping on percentages.
The bedcount is still under 300. The NUMBER of geriatrics and Medicare patients has gone up. And that doesn't even really matter, because geriatrics and Medicare patients aren't the only people who ever need hospital beds.
The overall population has increased, but the bed numbers and staff count has remained unchanged.
Math coming up:
You got 100,000 people. 70% of them are geriatrics. That's 70,000 people. Your hospital is built and staffed to accommodate 70,000 people, and therefore is accommodating 70% of the population.
Fast forward 5 years, you now have 200,000 people. 70% of them are geriatrics. The total population count of geriatrics is now 140,000 people. Your hospital is built to accommodate 70,000 people. That's somewhere around 38% of the total population (which is 200,000 people)
You've gone from a hospital that can handle the majority of the population, to a hospital that can't even handle half the population, within a 5-year period. The 70% is based on the population that existed when the hospital was built.
Percentages mean nothing when you don't put them in context.